Steven Ralbovsky ’76, played left wing on the freshman
soccer team in 1972, moved to midfield his sophomore year, and then
became a sweeper back for the balance of his brilliant career. He
played on three consecutive Ivy League championship teams and was a
two-time All-American and the MVP at DeWitt Clinton High School in
New York City. “He became an outstanding sweeper back,
comparable to Pat Migliore, although their styles were different.
Migs would break up a play and quickly clear the ball to his wings.
Robo would prefer to dribble the ball around near his own cage,
giving everyone a heart attack, especially our goalie, before
putting his head down and taking the ball up field himself.
Chuckling a bit, Stevenson adds: “The only thing Robo had to
learn was that there was only one head soccer coach at Brown. There
were times when he thought there were two, one named
Ralbovsky.” Born in Yugoslavia, Ralbovsky could answer Coach
Stevenson in one of five languages. He started playing soccer in
his native country where he was five, and as a teenager he was good
enough at table tennis to play for the Yugoslavia junior national
team. In his senior year on College Hill, Brown finished third in
the nation, losing to San Francisco in the semi-finals of the NCAA
Tourney. Ralbovsky was picked as the outstanding defensive player
in the tournament and later received the Robert R. Hermann trophy
as the top college senior of the year, as selected by the college
coaches. In the annual college soccer draft he was the number one
college pick of both soccer leagues and is now one of the brightest
professional stars as a midfielder for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers
of the North American Soccer League.